Thoughts on books, reading and publishing from the staff and friends of the Tattered Cover Book Store.

Monday, October 8, 2012

Tom's Recommending...

This is the story of a city.

The northwest corner of a city. Here you’ll find guests and hosts,
those with power and those without it, people who live somewhere special
and others who live nowhere at all. And many people in between.
Every city is like this. Cheek-by-jowl living. Separate worlds.

And then there are the visitations: the rare times a stranger
crosses a threshold without permission or warning, causing a disruption
in the whole system. Like the April afternoon a woman came to Leah
Hanwell’s door, seeking help, disturbing the peace, forcing Leah out of
her isolation…

Zadie Smith’s brilliant tragi-comic new novel follows four Londoners
- Leah, Natalie, Felix and Nathan – as they try to make adult lives
outside of Caldwell, the council estate of their childhood. From private
houses to public parks, at work and at play, their London is a
complicated place, as beautiful as it is brutal, where the thoroughfares
hide the back alleys and taking the high road can sometimes lead you to
a dead end.

Depicting the modern urban zone – familiar to town-dwellers everywhere – Zadie Smith’s NW is a quietly devastating novel of encounters, mercurial and vital, like the city itself.

Tom Harry has a streak of frost in his black pompadour and a venerable
bar called The Medicine Lodge, the chief watering hole and last refuge
of the town of Gros Ventre, in northern Montana. Tom also has a son
named Rusty, an “accident between the sheets” whose mother deserted them
both years ago.The pair make an odd kind of family, with the bar their
true home, but they manage just fine.

Until the summer of 1960,
that is, when Rusty turns twelve. Change arrives with gale force, in
the person of Proxy, a taxi dancer Tom knew back when, and her beatnik
daughter, Francine. Is Francine, as Proxy claims, the unsuspected legacy
of her and Tom’s past? Without a doubt she is an unsettling gust of the
future, upending every certainty in Rusty’s life and generating a mist
of passion and pretense that seems to obscure everyone’s vision but his
own. As Rusty struggles to decipher the oddities of adult behavior and
the mysteries build toward a reckoning, Ivan Doig wonderfully
captures how the world becomes bigger and the past becomes more complex
in the last moments of childhood.